Falling Apart

On two early EP’s for Warp, Cameron Reed of Babe Rainbow was still feeling things out while working in a loosely post-dubstep realm. His new album finds him in an exploratory mode, moving away from idiom and crafting a sound anchored by synths, piano keys, and a sense of narrative build.

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On two early EP’s for Warp, Shaved and Endless Path, Cameron Reed of Babe Rainbow was still feeling things out while working in a loosely post-dubstep realm. But even then, you could feel him striving to separate himself from the constraint of genre, and indeed, his best music emerged when he shelved his cursory or redundant beats and explored more ambient, textural terrain. Eventually, he became frustrated and uninspired, and briefly abandoned electronic music; he joined How to Dress Well’s touring band, and started working at the Toronto label Arts & Crafts, looking for something new.

He appears to have found what he was looking for. His new album, Falling Apart, finds him in an exploratory mode, moving away from idiom and crafting a sound anchored by synths, piano keys, and a sense of narrative build. The record begins Eno-ambient and slowly builds into a momentous, sometime triumphant gloom that recalls a range of other electronic experimentalists from Shigeto to Daniel Lopatin. In an interview with Fact Magazine, Reed said that he did not want to be “saddled to a style or a genre,” and he has made good on that pledge.

The challenge for him, then, is to bring the different sounds and textures that he explores into harmony with each other. On the best tracks here, Reed takes his knowledge of a diverse array of styles and creates music with a sense of story. This holds true on both a track-to-track basis (the build from “Dub Music” to “Twin Peaks” to “Falling Apart” is exquisite), and within individual tracks. “Swept Stairs” is one of the longest tracks on the album, but it's constantly introducing something new, beginning as a buzzing ominous landscape and then shedding that skin in favor of a joyous, piano-powered anthem. “Things That Were Not” is another highlight, a haunted and unhinged cacophony that Reed manages to tame into a sensible moving machine.

Reed has freed himself to pursue music that isn’t easy to categorize or predict, but his sense of adventure can work against him. Falling Apart is uneven. “The Bells”, for instance, is one of the best tracks here, a propulsive dance-floor track banger. But it operates at about twice the speed as the rest of the album and it seems like an interjection from another record. Then too, there are songs like "Plucks" and "The Walker", which fail from lack of momentum. They might have made sense if they’d been placed in the first half of the album, when things are still moving at tortoise-pace, but they seem out of place and unnecessary here. Reed has found an admirable sound on Falling Apart, but his promise not to honor any one style ultimately hurts the album’s cohesion.